Esoteric Lessons for the First Class of theSchool for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanumpart 1

Schmidt Number: S-5606

On-line since: 15th July, 2017

The First Goetheanum

by
Rudolf Steiner

Translated from the German by Frank Thomas Smith

Lesson One

Dornach, February 15, 1924

My
dear friends,

With this lesson, I would like to restore to the Free School
for Spiritual Science as an esoteric institution the task which
it has been in danger of being deprived of during the past
years. In this introductory lecture, I will not go further into
explaining that situation, but I wanted to stress the
importance of this moment by indicating the seriousness with
which our movement — which is daily being endangered and
undermined — must be imbued, especially in this School.
This is no unnecessary observation, for such seriousness has
not been apparent everywhere.

A
kind of preparatory introduction will be given today, my dear
friends. And I would like to emphasize that in this School
spiritual life is to be revealed in its true meaning, so that
you will be able to consider this School as an institution
which can provide for the revealed spiritual needs of our
times. This spiritual life can be deepened in all its aspects.
But a center must exist from out of which this deepening
derives, and the Center can be seen by those who wish to be
members of the School to be the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Therefore, I wish to begin the School today, with those members
for whom it has so far been possible to issue the membership
card, to begin in a way that will make you conscious of the
fact that every word spoken within this School is based on the
full responsibility towards the spirit revealed to our times
— that same spirit which has been revealed to humanity
throughout the centuries and millennia, but revealed in each
epoch in a special way. And this spirit will only give to
humanity what it is able to receive.

We
must be clear from the very beginning that it is not animosity
towards what the sense-world has accomplished for humanity when
in a School for Spiritual Science we attend to the revelations
of the spirit. We must also clearly recognize that the
sense-world has provided necessary, practical revelations to
humanity and this fact should not cause us to undervalue those
contributions in any way.

But
it is nevertheless important that the spiritual revelations are
received with all earnestness. For this — I must say it
at the outset — much prejudice and obstinacy, which is
deeply ingrained in the School's members, will have to go. It
will be necessary to investigate how one finds the path to his
own obstinacy, which hinders understanding what the School
should be. For many still don't think correctly about the
School. This must be gradually corrected. For it is only
possible for those to be in the School who take it in all
earnestness.

The
matter itself demands this. And on the other hand, we must
follow a difficult path in face of the opposition and
undermining forces which are increasing day by day. The members
of the School are by no means sufficiently attentive to this.
All this, my dear friends, must be kept in mind.

The
first and foremost thing to be observed in this School must of
course be what it is possible for the spirit to give us. It
will however be demanded of the members of the School that they
accompany us on the difficult path strewn with obstacles and
attempts at undermining it.

I
have gone into these things in our weekly periodical, What
is Happening in the Anthroposophical Society, and have also
explicitly differentiated there between the General
Anthroposophical Society and this School. And it is necessary
that this difference be felt in all its explicitness by the
members of the School, so that eventually only those persons
are members who really want to be representatives of
anthroposophy in all aspects of life. I say this now in order
to emphasize the seriousness of the matter.

*

First of all, I would like to present to your hearts and to
your souls what should stand over our School as a kind of
engraving. That we really identify with what emerges from the
life of the spirit onto our soul's ear and our soul's
understanding. We shall begin with the words:

Where
on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
derive from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-enveloped, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

I will
repeat it:

Where
on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
derive from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-enveloped, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

These words tell us that the world is beautiful and glorious
and sublime and the endless glow of revelation in all that
lives in leaf and blossom flows to our eyes with color on color
from the visible universe; it is meant to remind us how the
divine is manifested in what is lifeless in earthly matter, in
the thousands upon thousands of crystalline and non-crystalline
forms at our feet, in the water and air, in clouds and stars;
it makes clearer to us that the animal life that frolics in the
world and delights in its own existence and the warmth of its
existence — that all that is divine-spiritual revelation.
And it reminds us that we owe our own bodies to all those
shapes, to all that is greening and growing, color on color.
And it should also make us conscious of that fact that although
all that is beautiful and glorious and grand and divine to the
senses, it is futile to ask it what we ourselves are as human
beings.

Nature, although it glows to us as grand and powerful in tone
and strength and warmth, can never give us information about
ourselves, although it does give us a huge amount of
information about many divine aspects of the world. So we must
evermore repeat to ourselves: what we feel as our innermost
self is not woven from what we perceive as the beauty and
grandeur and greatness and power of nature. And the question
arises: Why does the reality of being all around us, of which
we are also a part, remain dim and silent?

And
what we might feel to be a kind of privation, we must
experience as a blessing, so that we can say in all seriousness
and sternness: We must first make ourselves truly human, warm
in soul and strong of spirit, so that we, as spirit in
humanity, may find the spirit in the world.

For
this it is necessary that we prepare ourselves, without levity,
to come to the frontier of the sense-world, where the spirit's
revelation can rise in us. We must say to ourselves: If we
arrive at this frontier unprepared and the full light of the
spirit comes upon us at once, then, because we have not yet
developed the strength of spirit and the warmth of soul
necessary for receiving the spirit, it would shatter us and
cast us back to our nothingness.

Therefore, at the frontier between the sense-world and the
spirit-world stands that messenger of the gods, that messenger
of the spirit, about whom we will hear more and more during the
next lessons, whom we will want to know always better and
better. That messenger of the spirit stands there and warningly
speaks, telling us how we should be and what we must set aside
so that we may approach the revelations of the spiritual world
in the right way.

And
when we have grasped, my dear friends, that the beauty, the
greatness and the sublimity of nature is, at first, spiritual
darkness for human knowledge, from which the light must be born
which tells us what we are and were and will be; then we must
know that the first thing to come from the darkness that must
be grasped is that Spirit-Messenger who sends us the
appropriate warning. Therefore, let this Spirit-Messenger's
words resound in our souls, and let the Spirit-Messenger's
description shine out before our soul's eye.

And
from out the darkness you appear,
(the human being is addressed)
Your likeness manifesting you,
Yet also a parable of you,
Earnest spirit-words in cosmic ether
Heard by your heart, giving strength

To you the Spirit-Messenger, who alone
Can light for you the way;
Before him the fields of sense widen,
Behind him yawn the abyss-depths.

And before his dark spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning abyss of being,
Resounds his ur-potent creative words:
Behold, I am the only gate to knowledge.

It
must be clear to us that we must take seriously all that comes
as warning from the Spirit-Messenger before daring to fathom
what is found not on this side of the yawning abyss, that is,
in the area of the senses, but on the other side spreading out
as spirituality. This is veiled at first in darkness for human
understanding, and can only be revealed by the countenance of
the Spirit-Messenger, who appears at first to be similar to the
human being, but transformed into one of gigantic stature.
Then, although he is so similar to man, his form is shadowy, as
though he were a mere parable of man. He warns that without the
appropriate seriousness, no one should seek what lies beyond
the yawning abyss. The earnest messenger entreats us to be
earnest as well.

And
then, when we hear that voice and have grasped it with due
seriousness, we should be aware of how at first softly, most
softly, and in abstractions, it wishes to give us indications
and orientation from the spiritual world about the abyss which
yawns before us and from which the Messenger holds us back less
we take a careless step. The voice resounds:

From
the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the stages of the course of time,
which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They
resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O man, know thyself!

I will
say it again:

From
the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the stages of the course of time,
which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They
resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O man, know thyself!

These words can make it clear to us how the secrets of
existence must be fathomed from all that acts and works in the
depths of space and which from the depths of space manifest how
real knowledge must be fathomed from what is revealed in the
march of time as creative action, and how all that is revealed
of the world in the human heart must be revealed by the soul's
honest seeking. For all this can only constitute a basis for
what one needs for fathoming one's self, in which the world has
planted the sum of its secrets. Thus, they can be discovered
through human self-knowledge. Everything man needs in sickness
and in health on his journey between birth and death, and what
he will also have to use on that other existential journey
between death and a new birth.

But
all those who consider themselves members of this School should
clearly realize that everything that is not acquired in this
way is not real knowledge, but only pseudo-knowledge, that what
usually passes for science, what man learns before he has
acquired an awareness of the Guardian of the Threshold's
warnings regarding spiritual knowledge, is all
pseudo-knowledge. It doesn't have to stay pseudo-knowledge
though. We do not scorn this pseudo-knowledge. But we must
realize that it will only emerge from the stage of
pseudo-knowledge once it has been transformed by all man can
know about that purification and metamorphosis of his being,
which he achieves when he understands what the Spirit-Messenger
warns at the yawning abyss of knowledge — what the
shining spirit warningly calls out from the darkness on behalf
of the best spiritual inhabitants of the spiritual
world.

Whoever does not acquire the awareness that between the sojourn
in the fields of sense — which we must live during our
earthly existence between birth and death — and the
spiritual fields, a yawning abyss exists, cannot achieve true
knowledge. For only by means of this awareness can true
knowledge be acquired. He doesn't have to become clairvoyant,
although knowledge from the spiritual world comes by true
clairvoyance. But he must acquire an awareness of what
exists as a warning at the yawning abyss of the secrets of
space, the secrets of time, the secrets of the human heart
itself. For whether we go out into space, the abyss is
there; or if we wander in the turning points of time, the abyss
is there; if we enter into the heart itself, the abyss is
there.

And
these three abysses, they are not three abysses, they are only
one abyss. For if we wander out into space so far that we come
to where the expanses of space merge, we find the spirit; if we
wander in the turning points of time to where they originate at
the beginning of their cycles, if we wander into the depths of
the human heart, so deep that we can only fathom ourselves:
these three ways lead to only one goal, to one last stop, not
to three different stops. They all lead to the same
divine-spirituality that bubbles from the spring
that fructifies and feeds all being, but also teaches man
to recognize the ground of existence in knowledge.

In
such earnest awareness, we shall stand in thought where the
earnest Spirit-Messenger speaks and listen to what he relates
about the obstacles relative to our times, which we must sweep
away in order to come to true spiritual knowledge.

Obstacles to spiritual knowledge, my dear friends, have existed
in all times. In all times the people have had to overcome this
and that, put aside this and that according to the warnings of
the earnest Guardian of the Threshold to the spiritual world.
But there are obstacles peculiar to each age. What proceeds
from human civilization is to a large extent not helpful, but
rather hindrance for access to the spiritual world. And man
must find the particular obstacles that emerge from each
earthly civilization, and are implanted in his nature by that
very civilization, and which he must put aside before he can
cross the yawning abyss.

Therefore, let us now hear the earnest watchful Messenger of
the gods speak about this:

Yes,
you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold
the first beast, the crooked back,
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

Behold
the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your flame for knowledge must subdue him.

Behold
the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

Only
when you've defeated the three
Will wings sprout upon your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
to consecrate itself in healing.

I will
read it again:

The
Guardian speaks:

Yes,
you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold
the first beast, the crooked back,
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

Behold
the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your flame for knowledge must subdue him.

Behold
the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

Only
when you've defeated the three
Will wings sprout upon your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
to consecrate itself in healing.

These, my dear friends, are the three greatest enemies of
knowledge for contemporary humanity. The human being of today
is afraid of the spirit's creativity. Fear sits deep in his
soul. And he would like to conjure it away. So he dresses his
fear in all kinds of pseudo-logical arguments by which he tries
to refute spiritual revelations.

You
will hear, my dear friends, from this or that side arguments
against spiritual knowledge. It is sometimes dressed in clever,
sometimes in sly, sometimes in foolish logical rules. Never,
however, are the logical rules the reason why spiritual
knowledge is refuted. Rather is it the spirit of fear that
lives and works deep into humanity's inner life which, when it
rises to the head, translates into logical reasons. It is
fear!

But
it is not sufficient to say: I am not afraid. Everyone can of
course say that. We must first comprehend the nature and the
seat of this fear. We must tell ourselves that we were born and
educated according to the present time, in which the Ahrimanic
side has installed spirits of fear, and that we are tainted by
these spirits. And conjuring them away doesn't mean that they
really go. We must find the ways and the means — and this
School will provide guidance — to bravery and knowledge
against those spirits of fear which reside as monsters in our
will. For it is not what often leads people to knowledge
nowadays — or what they say does — that can provide
true knowledge, but rather only courage, the inner courage of
soul which provides the strength and the capacity to follow the
path that leads to true, real, light-filled spiritual
knowledge.

And
the second beast, which creeps into the human soul from the
spirit of the times to become an enemy of knowledge, this beast
lurks everywhere we go — in most of the literary works of
the day, in most of the art galleries, in most sculpture and
art in general and music. It wreaks its havoc in the schools
and in society. In order to avoid having to confess its fear of
the spirit, it resorts to mocking spiritual knowledge.

This mockery is not always openly expressed, because people are
not conscious of what is within them. But I would say that only
a thin wall, the thickness of a spiderweb, separates what
is in people's consciousness and what is in their hearts
wanting to mock true spiritual knowledge. And when the mockery
is open, it is only when the more or less conscious
impertinence of modern man is able to suppress the fear. But
basically, everyone today is vaccinated against the spirit's
revelations. And the mockery is manifested in the most unusual
ways.

The
third beast is lazy thinking, the kind of thinking that would
make the whole world a movie, because then no one is required
to think — everything is reeled out and all one has to do
is follow what is reeled out. Even science would like to follow
the world's phenomena with passive thinking. Man is too lazy
and comfortable to activate his thinking. Humanity's thinking
nowadays can be compared to someone who wants to pick something
up from the floor and stands there with his hands in his
pockets and thinks he can pick the thing up that way. But he
cannot. And existence cannot be comprehended by thinking with
its hands in its pockets. We must move our arms and hands if we
want to grasp something from the floor. We must activate our
thinking if we want to grasp the spirit.

The
Guardian of the Threshold characterizes the first beast, which
lurks as fear in your will, as a beast with a crooked back and
a bony face and scrawny body. This beast, with its dull
blue skin, is verily what rises from the abyss and stands
alongside the Guardian of the Threshold for today's humanity.
And the Guardian of the Threshold makes it quite clear to the
humanity of today that this beast is actually in you! It rises
from out of the yawning abyss which lies in front of the
knowledge fields, and reflects what lurks in your will as an
enemy of knowledge.

And
the second beast, which is connected to the desire to mock the
spiritual world, is characterized by the Guardian of the
Threshold in a similar way. It emerges alongside the other
monster, but its whole attitude is one of weakness and
sleepiness. With this sleepy posture and gray-greenish body, it
bares its teeth in a warped face. And this baring of teeth is
meant to indicate laughter, but lies, because to mock is to
lie. So it grins at us as the reflection of the beast that
lives in our own feeling and, as the enemy of knowledge,
hinders our search for knowledge.

And
the Guardian of the Threshold characterizes the third beast,
which will not approach the world in spirit, as emerging from
the abyss with cloven muzzle, dull glassy eyes, slouching
posture and dirty-red form. Such is the doubt which speaks
through the cloven muzzle and doubt in the power of
spirit-light which expresses itself in the dirty-red form. This
is the third of the knowledge enemies that lurks in us. They
make us earthbound.

If
we approach spirit-knowledge accompanied by them, ignoring the
Guardian of the Threshold's warning, we encounter the yawning
abyss. One cannot pass over it earthbound, nor with fear nor
mockery, nor with doubt. One can pass over it by grasping in
thought the spirituality of being, by experiencing in
feeling the soul of being, by strengthening the activity of
being in the will. Then the spirit, the soul and the activity
of being give us wings of release from the weight of earth.
Then we can cross over the abyss.

The
steps of prejudice are threefold and will cast us into the
abyss if we fail to acquire courage, fire and creative
knowledge. If, however, we do acquire creative knowledge in
thinking and we want to activate thinking, if we do not wish to
approach the spirit in dreamy lassitude, but receive the spirit
with inner heartfelt fire, and when we have the courage
to really grasp the spirit as spirit, not merely letting
it approach us as a materialistic picture, then will the wings
grow which will carry us over the abyss, where every human
heart that is honest with itself today desires to go.

That is what I wish to bring before your souls, my dear
friends, by means of this first introductory lesson, with which
this School for Spiritual Science begins.

In
closing, let us review once more the beginning, middle and end
of the experiences with the Guardian of the Threshold.

Where
on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
derive from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-enveloped, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

And
from out the darkness you appear,
(the human being is addressed)
Your likeness manifesting you,
Yet also a parable of you,
Earnest spirit-words in cosmic ether
Heard by your heart, giving strength

To you the Spirit-Messenger, who alone
Can light for you the way;
Before him the fields of sense widen,
Behind him yawn the abyss-depths.

And before his dark spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning abyss of being,
Resounds his ur-potent creative words:
Behold, I am the only gate to knowledge.

The
Guardian speaks:

From
the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the stages of the course of time,
which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They
resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O man, know thyself!

The
Guardian continues:

Yes,
you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold
the first beast, the crooked back,
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

Behold
the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your flame for knowledge must subdue him.

Behold
the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

Only
when you've defeated the three
Will wings sprout upon your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
to consecrate itself in healing.

As
to what we will experience when we have passed the Guardian of
the Threshold, what is necessary in feeling, willing, thinking
to experience in order to pass by the Guardian's light, and
enter into the darkness from out of which that light shines in
which we recognize the light of our own humanity, and thus
arrive at “O man, know thyself!” — which
calls out, which manifests from the spirit that enlightens the
darkness. About all that, my dear friends, next Friday during
the next lesson of the First Class.